Yes, I really did not want to write about this again, but as you must
not have seen the discussion in the past...
The free engines work fine for many people, and fine for some or many
jobs for others, but for another groups of us who do things that
require near perfect
results, i.e. to fill out paperwork that has life impacting
importance, read mail that may be in much less clear fonts than those
you have recognized on
your computer screen with ocrdesktop, etc, yes, there is for sure a
reason to use something that gives better results.
I can't compare abbyy to teseract as I've not used the former, but I
can compare the results using lios or something else using teseract to
the results I
got using kurzweil, and the difference on more than one occasion, was
between around 70% accuracy and 92% accuracy. That is major, and not
only that, but
70% accuracy is not good enough to do more than see what something is
more or less, e.g., would you get anything out of a bank statement
that was only 70%
read correctly?
I do not get bank documents, or anything else in paper if I can get it
on line as a pdf, but the whole point of the program, as far as I know
lios is what
is being worked on,
is to give folks something good enough to do as much as is possible
with, i.e. not a something that won't work for many people in its
target user base.
I do not use other opperating systems other than Linux on my PC(s)
unless there is a document I can not OCR. I honestly can think of
nothing else other
than occasional curiosity that has gotten me to use my one installed
copy of windows in years, but I must keep a working windows to run
kurzweil, and I can
imagine myself traveling, and traveling I'd not have my windows box
with me ever, where I'd need to read a paper of some kind.
I can not say to someone who has always gotten very good results
using cuniform or teseract that that is not there experience, but
I've seen the
difference in results between the better proprietary options and the
options from the FOS world.
Also, as long as I am writing this, the one major difference between
the "eloquence case" as another poster called it and this is that the
old ibm-tts has
not been developed in years. Abbyy is a maintained piece of software,
and there are other proprietary engines that are maintained and or
under development
that might become available, or be made available for us on Linux.
Would I prefer seeing tesseract improve to at least with in striking
range of the accuracy acheived by the best solutions available for
personal computers,
hell yes! If that isnot possible would I like to see some one write a
new rockin FOS OCR solution, again for sure and of course.
I do not know of such work, but as I said before, then when it becomes
available we can use the free engine(s), but until then let's not try
and tell
people they can't work, and or must get a lot of extra sighted help.
If you do not need the proprietary engine, then of course you are more
than free not to use it, but do not try and hold those who do need it
back.
I'm done, said this stuff before, tried to be clear and maybe even
persuasive, but hey, the fsf has not even put a priority on
accessiblity that I've ever
seen.
What, one of their darling distros is nicely accessibler for blind
folks, another completely unusable from what I hear, and...can't
remember about the
other for sure.
My point being, we are not necesarily going to get any help from the
hard core free software movement, nor have I seen any new free OCR
projects mentioned
in any context, so it's posibly not just a case of holding out for a
few months.
I get the propaganda because I strongly support FOS, even started a
google group to promote the discussion of accessible free software,
but because some
proprietary projects exist in the world, and maybe some of us need to
use a few of them, that does not make free software less valid, not as
good or
anything else other than what it is and can be.
Actually there's a case to be made that a good proprietary project can
put pressure on the good free project to become better, not just a
"poorman's
solution".
I apologize for the verbose conclusion, bjut really want to move on to
other things and wanted to make the major points and be done with it.
Regards,
